How to Raise Boys to Follow God (#012)

[Music] welcome back to the burro shire podcast i'm brandon vaught one of the co-hosts and joining me here to talk about life faith books spirituality and everything in between is father blake britton father blake good to see you good to see you too and excited to discuss all those topics our last episode was the longest we've ever done and i'm afraid that probably won't be the last time i ever say that because these our discussions continue to drift uh in terms of time but we're gonna try to keep this one a little shorter i think the last one was close to an hour and a half so this one will not be that long today we're going to be talking about boys and god boys and god uh father blake and i have personal experience in this topic since we were both boys and we both believe in god um so i think we have some good stuff to share from experience but also more importantly i'm a father of young boys and father blake is a spiritual father to many boys he not only uh serves at his parish but he also oversees the school attached to the parish and has regular interactions with with boys and so what we wanted to talk about in this episode especially is how to lead boys to god how to orient their hearts and their souls to a love of god and develop them into healthy holistic catholic men maybe before we get to that the how-to though father blake let's talk a little bit about why this is such a problem today i don't think it would be a surprise to any listener to say that we're kind of in a crisis of authentic masculinity not just among grown men but among boys too we've we've sort of lost the tradition of developing and shaping young boys into good men why are we in the spot that we're in today yeah this is this has been one of the unforeseen graces of my priestly ministry has been forming boys and young men into catholic men catholic saints and of course one of the the main things that hindered that recently in church history was those horrible abuse crises and this really led to a severance between priests and children in general but boys specifically and really that's a relationship that's supposed to be there meaning in a mentorship kind of capacity that priests are meant to be spiritual role models and spiritual fathers for boys and to guide them along their own journeys of course with their biological fathers so they may reach their pinnacle of holiness so this has been as i mentioned an unforeseen grace especially with the school as i spend time with the boys and i know how they are so drawn to how i live and so drawn to by what i do and they're constantly asking me you know father can you show me how to do that you know can you show me how to throw a football father can you show me how to run that way father can you can you show me how to find this in the catechism or how to read this from thomas aquinas or why aristotle said this right they're always looking and they're just so deeply encouraged and i started wondering why that is why are they drawn to this and contemplating that question and as i spoke with more and more of them i started realizing that first and foremost sadly a lot of them didn't have fathers at home and so there's this void of receiving a proper form of masculinity or proper role model of masculinity their role models of masculinity are sports uh idols our music icons are people in the entertainment industry which are not always the best role models and most certainly not the best catholic role models and also for those who did have fathers their fathers would be good men but they themselves didn't have good catholic role models growing up so even though they're trying to be really good catholic dads they're sort of floundering because they're like i don't know how to raise a good catholic boy because i wasn't you know didn't really have that growing up uh and so in recognizing that i found that this is a big problem in our society and how desperately the priesthood as well as the vocation of fatherhood your vocation brandon is needed by the church at this time to help form boys in their youth and in their teenage years so that they develop all the virtues necessary to start living the fullness of life and we see this by the way in church history i think very fondly of saint john bosco and his ministry to to boys of saint john baptist de la salle the founder of the of the lasallian brothers who were teachers throughout the world they had a particular love for forming boys in holiness and this led to a plethora of vocations in the life of the church this led to tons of young men growing up to be holy saints and holy fathers and holy husbands and we are in desperate need of that yet again you know as a father i find this interesting predicament that studies show and this rings true in my own life that parents spend more time with their children than ever before and this is especially true of millennial parents you know many millennial parents like myself were raised in divorced homes you know with parents that were working a lot and the way they expressed their love was to you know work jobs and earn a lot of money and buy us a lot of things you know so you've got video games or gifts or whatever whereas a lot of millennial parents and again please i'm over generalizing here but just general trends show that millennial parents by and large say i want to be more present with my kids than my parents were so a lot of fathers especially are kind of the cycle is swinging back around to where fathers want to be there with their kids for more time yet still we feel ill-equipped to shape and form our boys to become young men like we know that it requires a presence of time but in terms of the skills in terms of the processes you know the path of masculine initiation i think that's still the big missing piece of the puzzle like past cultures especially native american cultures and pagan cultures had very robust thick processes of initiation it was very clear when a boy became a man because he had to complete this or that series of tasks or he'd approve himself in this or that way and we don't really have any processes like that today that you know clearly guide a young boy down the path of manhood so i see a lot of these problems sort of cumulatively swirling together you have you know things like the sex abuse crisis which put a divide between a lot of older men and boys especially priests and boys you have a lack of fatherhood over the last 40 to 50 years with the divorce culture and fathers that have checked out but then you have this lacuna of initiation practices to draw a young boy into the masculine way right and this is also why on another topic that we talk about a lot and that's very close to my heart video games are so popular among young men and boys video games have become this place where they can artificially and virtually actualize their masculinity because it's not actually being actualized in reality so when mothers and fathers contact me on a regular basis to ask why is my 16 year old son playing call of duty for eight hours a day well it's because he wants to be a soldier he wants to be a hero he wants to save people he wants to protect people and he needs someone to mentor him into that for reality he wants to love someone he wants to be with a woman and to protect her he wants to sacrifice his life but he doesn't know how and it's not his fault it's not because he's a bad kid it's because the society around is not able to provide those resources anymore to inform and shape his masculinity beginning with the home but also the society as a larger whole is also unable or unwilling to do so this is a void in the lacuna that the church most certainly needs to desperately address and specifically the relationship between priest and fathers young young fathers needs to be deepened that's been another great ministry that i did not expect in my parish but it's my relationship with young dads and how we are learning to be fathers together you know when i go over to their home and i i visit them and we talk together and they share their struggles and then i help them you know hold their son or hold their little baby girl we laugh we have dinner together with their wives they're really discerning and trying to become saints and i am too i'm trying to become a holy priest and i'm learning from them as i spend more and more time with them so that relationship also needs to be strengthened that's one of the great graces of our friendship brandon is that in your vocation and my vocation which are both complementary and marrying of one another we're able to see we're able to see where we need to grow and also how we're called to form the children that have been entrusted to us but specifically our sons and how they're called to holiness let's stick on that topic for a little bit more this relationship between priests and biological fathers so talk to us a little bit about um this from two different angles one i know we have a lot of priests watching this so what advice would you give to priests to develop better relationships with the young dads in their parishes but then two i know we have a lot of young dads who watch and listen to this podcast what would you say to them to better facilitate this relationship with priests first for my brother priests and again it's always just such a joy for me to even think that they're a brother priest watching this so we're just how close all of you are to my heart my dear brothers and thank you for saying yes to your vocation to the priesthood and to our bride the church so number one thing for us is that we ourselves need to be men of masculine virtue and chastity holiness sacrifice servitude if we love the sacred liturgy and sacrifice the mass of devotion if we hear confessions with piety and with love and divine mercy if we anoint the sick with strength and with unyielding spirit of selflessness men will be drawn to us naturally because those seeing us virtues that they long for they'll see wait a minute there is a man here who is giving his all for the church who's giving his all for his bride and that's the kind of man that i desire to be too so it's not so much even initiating anything with these young fathers it's you yourself trying to be a good father and what i found is that organically relationships will then start developing so for all the dads that i have a good relationship with they literally a hundred percent of them have said we were drawn to you because of how devoted you are to your priesthood when we saw the kind of priest you are that made us want to have a relationship with you so that we could be that kind of man for our children and they've all approached me and said father can you just sit down with me for just 15 minutes and tell me why you love the church so much you know can you just come over to my house for dinner and just meet my wife my kids you know i just think that and they always mention their sons they're like i just think my boys would love to meet you and and hang out and it's always a blast you know we have a wonderful time so that's for my brother priest that's step one be masculine and holy yourselves be men of devotion to our vocation and that will naturally draw and build relationships on the side of our young fathers who are listening again thank you for your incredible vocation how desperately we need you in the church today in your own heart start praying now for the lord to send a good priest into your life i know brandon that you prayed for that i know that there are many young fathers who long for that start praying lord i desire for you to send a good priest into my life and for my family i i pray that you send a good priest to be a mentor to my sons and he could who could show them the way of sacrifice and holiness and who who could help me and my fatherhood to raise these boys into good catholic upstanding men and then to keep your eyes peeled try to find holy priest and don't force a relationship onto them but whenever you find a holy priest to go up to him and let him know that you that you recognize that you know you really you're a priest that inspires me and i was wondering if may we could talk sometime and i would love to sit down and just hear about your heart and hear about your priesthood and then of course the other thing for our young fathers is strive for holiness yourself to strive for a way for your own for your own manhood and your own desire to serve jesus christ we'll get to that later in the podcast when you talk about our identity as beloved sons of the father and how important that is to fatherhood but those are the different perspectives from the priesthood and from young fathers that i would say but i would love to hear brandon from you sort of in your own perspective how how that relationship has developed yeah i echo a lot of the things that you just said i think our relationship you and mine developed organically in just the way you described like i saw you your devotion to the priesthood i saw the way that you celebrated mass the way that you interacted with young kids and i invited you over to our house because i wanted you to have dinner and meet my kids and my sons especially so it played out exactly as you described but it's been i think a unique dimension that like it's one thing for me to connect with other fathers and have uh biological fathers and have them come over and have dinner and have other biological fathers and boys to be hanging around our house but whenever you're over the boy my boys see a different dimension of what it means to be a man they see me sacrificing myself and pouring myself out for my bride kathleen but they see you pouring yourself in sacrificing on behalf of the church and that's a dimension of masculinity that without the priesthood they wouldn't see so i think it's critical in the development of my boys to see that full scope of masculinity and not just the romantic dimension of masculinity they see in their parents and it also opens up for them and this is what a lot of boys nowadays are deprived of it opens and broadens their horizons on how their masculinity can be actualized so it's not just with married life or children although that is a beautiful way to actualize our manhood but also priesthood being a monk religious life consecrated celibacy this is a way that my manhood could also live to its fullness but we how can we know that if we don't see other men living that lifestyle men learn how to be men with other men boys learn how to be men by watching other men be men so this is really important for us and for our children in their development and i say our children because it's my child too you know as a priest you are a father and these boys are your responsibility and shame on you if you're not trying to find ways and i say this first and foremost to myself trying to find ways to be that example for them and to encourage them also to be open to the heart of jesus all right i want to spend some time looking at some of the paths to help boys grow into good catholic men and some of the practices that you and i have sort of gleaned from our experiences and interactions but before we get there i think it's critical that we define what we mean by authentic masculinity or authentic catholic masculinity this term i think is one of the most um uh ambiguous terms controversial terms it's used in so many different way equivocating is the word i'm used it's one of the most equivocated terms it's used in so many different ways that often conflict with each other so for example we hear about toxic masculinity which is sort of an avant-garde phrase which usually just means any form of masculinity i don't like you know because i've seen i've seen the phrase toxic masculinity applied to mutually contradicting things uh but i think most of us know what we mean when we hear that term we mean like an exaggerated chauvinistic machismo you know toxic masculinity means the the aggressive male that uses brute strength and physical force to dominate others to objectify and control women and you know things like that and obviously that's not the type of masculinity that we want our boys to develop into so let's look at authentic masculinity what how would you describe or can you give us an example of somebody that you think embodies authentic catholic masculinity i'm kind of just kind of setting you up with a softball here jesus there's a man can you think like a son of man that maybe embodies authentic masculinity starts but uh but before we get to our lord and to our savior just to to elaborate on that point that you just made brandon with this toxic masculinity and the reaction of toxic masculinity which has been what i call a feminist so we have f effeminacy with an e which just means to be feminine that's not necessarily a bad thing like femininity is not a bad thing but a feministy is this twisted inauthentic femininity when it's applied to a man and that's something that's very unhealthy so we have these two extremes right now in our society you have the mel chauvinism then you have the a feminist the sort of anti-femininity which is taking place in a lot of men and as a response to those two extremes of manhood you also have even within the catholic world now this sort of rising up robust notion of masculinity that also is not always authentic right so um i have a lot of the young fathers in my parish and and so and they they listen to various kinds of um podcasts and things like that and they're like you know well to be a man is to smoke my cigar and grow a beard you know and like chop wood down or something like that it's not to say those things are necessarily against masculinity but we can't narrow masculinity those kind of activities it's something that's essential so with that in mind we're going to go back to jesus christ of course what's the most defining characteristic of a man sacrifice this is what jesus shows us from the cross a man is someone who completely and totally is selfless now that is true also of a woman femininity also has its own way of sacrifice and selflessness but it's unique according to gender it's not new it's not neuter the way that a man sacrifices the way that a man gives himself is different and beautiful in comparison to a woman who gives herself which is also different and beautiful and profound what is this way that christ has given himself for his bride the church first and foremost by the giving up of his flesh so we see selflessness humility which christ describes as meekness meekness is not the same thing as weakness but also within christ we see the virtue of courage steadfastness this willing to stare into the face of evil and to the den of the lion and to say get out of him leave him he looks into satan himself and says leave now he claims his own fatherhood as the one who has come to establish the holy mother church so these are the different characteristics that we need to turn towards if we want to really build an authentic masculinity in christ we see the gentleness of jesus when he caresses the head of mary magdalene after she's thrust in front of him about to be stoned to death we see the gentleness of jesus as he picks up and spins a child around in a circle and and holds them as they laugh together and says whatever you do to the least of my children that you do unto me but at the same time we also see his devotion when he's carrying the cross with his flesh dangling from his body like tattered rags and he goes and is naked before his bride the church represented in our lady mother mary and pours out the last drop of his blood before anyone else or anything else christ crucified us who we as men need to gaze upon to gauge our masculinity if we don't look like that then something's wrong if we don't live that way then we need to check ourselves and how we're living as men all right so i think that's a great call to arms for all of us catholic men to follow the catholic man who is jesus christ and embody his form of masculinity but let's move to some practices that we can do to help our boys to encounter that form of masculinity um we've got you and i talked a little bit before this shows we've got several listed here that i want to talk through one of the first ones is we need to early on connect our boys to the fatherhood of god and help them to relate to god as father i think this is a missing piece for a lot of young men in fact it's often reversed that they don't relate to god as father until much later in life till they've already related to their biological father as father and this is why you have you know all of these psychological and spiritual issues where men find it hard to relate to god the father because they had horrible biological fathers and so the damage has been done and it's hard for them to detach their conception of fatherhood from their bad biological father so one thing you and i both recommend is at an early point in a boy's life don't wait till they're a young adult or an adult an early point they need to be introduced to the loving fatherhood of god and be able to see god and speak to god and listen to god as father how do we do that with young boys as you said from a young age letting them know that they have a father who loves them even more than you do and that's the father in heaven i've had to share this on a regular basis with a lot of the boys and young men and teens at our parish in school who maybe struggle with different things in life and who think that they're not good enough or maybe their fathers are not emotionally present there for them or even physically present there for them to let them know well there is a father there's a father that loves you more than i do there's a father that loves you more than anyone does that father will always hold you in the palm of his hand you can always turn towards him this is also really important by the way for those who are even good dads because even a good dad will mess up sometimes they're going to fall short we're going to make mistakes i am not a flawless human being i'm a spiritual father but even my own spiritual fatherhood as a priest will fall short i'll succumb to my personal sinfulness every once in a while and that's why also as a priest it's so important for us to turn our faithful towards the eyes of christ towards his priesthood and towards the father please don't make personality cults we cannot build a community around ourselves that's very very dangerous we need to build it around the sacramental life of the church and build it around the father's love through his son and the grace of the spirit so that way if we were to drop dead tomorrow the parish would still be thriving because it's rooted in the priesthood of jesus christ not in the priest not just me for the young fathers turning these boys on a regular basis towards god the father letting them see you as a son let them see you as a beloved son of the father do you really see yourself as one who's loved by the father whenever you pray do you talk to the father or just to christ especially out loud when we teach our sons how to pray the name of the father son the holy spirit amen father father we thank you we thank you for the gift of this day we thank you for allowing our family to be safe we thank you for mommy and for our little sister and for our big brother and and and father help us to know your son jesus christ the lord and lord jesus pour into the depths of our hearts your spirit holy spirit make us your instruments do you see how that form of prayer is creating a logic in your child's mind so that they're going through the trinitarian formula so that form of prayer is catechetical they're recognizing the father as their first road of recourse and that by the grace of the father who's revealed himself and the fullness by his son and that through the son's passion death and resurrection they receive the grace of the spirit and by the grace of the spirit the sacramental life of the church and their mission to the world so it's instilling in them these values that's the first way that i would say you're able to cultivate within the heart of your son this deep love for the father and also to let them know when you leave home someday when you go to college or when you get married and have your own family or when you go into seminary to become a priest when i'm not there you're i have a risk turn towards him before you turn to anything else turn towards him before you turn towards netflix turn towards him before you turn towards drinking turn towards him before you turn towards pornography turn towards him before you turn towards trying to find comfort in food or just hanging out with your friends turn towards the father when your heart is longing for truth and for a meaning in life and you will find it if you as a father could teach your son that gift you give him something that will go beyond your own life that will go on for eternity you're giving him the greatest gift possible and the greatest recourse of holiness i love that it's liberating to me as a father to to know like my primary responsibility is to draw the hands of my son into the hand of the father to connect them with their heavenly father who will ultimately father them in all the good ways we're describing like i sort of play a participatory role or you know i sort of co-father along with the heavenly father but like if all i do as a father is bring my sons to the throne of the heavenly father like i'm a successful father i've done what i'm here to do and in some ways it's like liberating to know it's not all up to me like the heavenly father is the one who's ultimately going to father them and that's always important for us to know as parents and not just fathers but mothers as well any time that we think this vocation is only ours it becomes overwhelming immediately saint john vianney said this he said if if we really knew what the priesthood was by ourselves we would die and it's true if you if you really think that your priesthood or if you really think that your fatherhood is completely and totally your own without christ without the father then it is devastating you're like i can't do this this is just too much and you're right but with the father with the son with the holy spirit with the sacramental grace of the church the eucharist the sacrament reconciliation this absolutely is possible you can become a saint and you can make your children saints too you know a few years ago maybe a little bit more than that i read a great book in fact i think i've mentioned it here in a past episode called the way of the wild heart and it's by an evangelical named john eldridge he's more famous for a book called wild at heart which was kind of you know the foundational book of modern evangelical masculinity movement um anyway the way of the wild heart was a sequel which was all about how fathers can parent young boys and walk them down this path of masculinity and i still wholeheartedly recommend it to fathers i'll link to it here below but his overall thesis was we've lost these moments of initiation i hinted at that earlier that we used to have all these markers of boyhood um and not just in native american tribes or pagan cultures but even in things like the boy scouts like with the boy scouts you had to reach certain milestones to get certain badges but all of that provided boys a tangible way to measure progress like i'm getting closer to my goal of being a man by getting all the badges and you know accomplishing all the projects or whatever and as groups like the boy scouts have sort of fallen out of favor and the lives of most boys a lot of us are sort of just flailing and we have no way to measure progress and masculinity so what eldridge proposes and what he does with his boys is he has created this whole system of initiation where when a boy turns 13 years old there's like a whole year's worth of tasks that he puts them through and challenges like one of them is you know we're going to drop you in the woods and you got you know this and that tool and you got to survive and come back to us the next morning you know and there's like woods like you know half a mile away he's not like driving three hours out saying you know good luck uh but anyway it's it's that kind of thing that your your older brother tried this but he didn't do too well that's why there's only three of us now but hopefully you do better but his point is that you know the boy comes back and he's got this sense of accomplishment i've survived i have what it takes that's the aching question at the heart of every boy do i have what it takes and then after this year's over after they've you know completed all these missions and tasks they have a big ceremony at their house where they invite all of their friends their pastor all the boys friends and it's sort of a ceremony of initiation and celebration for the boy so they they read out different speeches and prayers they bring the boy up he he gives them the gift of a sword which i love i know you would love to and you know sort of i don't know if unites him but there's some sort of ceremony that he's their passing of the sword so it's recalling all of these you know medieval and pre-christian initiation ceremonies but the reason i'm explaining this is the whole point i'm reading this book as a catholic and again not to repudiate anything in the book i love all that and we've tried to do some of that with our boys i'm thinking the catholic church already has all of these markers of initiation that you know things like baptism and then confirmation and then marriage these sacraments that are meant to be these signposts but that we've sort of just dumped off as you know honorary checkpoints or graduation points that are perfunctory and you kind of move through but talk about the need for as we're trying to raise boys into men what are the importance of the sacraments in this journey yeah well before i get to that i just had to laugh as you were talking about the boy scouts so just a little bit of background on father blake's family of origin my father is a marine and you will know it once you meet him and i remember i asked him once to become part of the boy scouts because they were doing cool stuff and he said well do they give you food when you're in the woods i was like yeah he's like do they give you a tent to sleep in i was like yes he said you're not joining them that's too he said you're going to the blade to the uh excuse me the tim britain no food no sense and uh and of course he was saying that in jest you know he wasn't trying to bash the boy scouts an amazing amazing organization but he had to put on that marine corps front that all being said in regards to the sacraments you're absolutely correct brandon this is hallmark these are gifts given by the church that already demarcate moments in our lives we enter from childhood to adulthood that specifically in the latin rite is where the sacrament of confirmation would come into play for those who have the sacrament taking place in the teenage years so in that time period this young man would decide am i living this catholic faith on my own initiative or am i not and that sense of ownership of the faith i think has been lost in the uh in that final sacrament of initiation uh but overall these sacraments are places where we can form our boys and shape their masculinity around these different sacraments and i would even say when they get to the age of reason when they're able to really start talking and dialoguing about these things speak about the baptism that was the beginning of your boyhood journey to manhood then speak about the sack of reconciliation what's the virtue that you learned there humility and courage humility and courage humility to know that you're broken and the courage to say it this is the virtue that you learn in your masculinity at that at that particular sacrament for the eucharist you learn selflessness adoration and sacrifice you learn who your god is you learn who your savior is and you learn that he's come to save you and how to mimic and live his sacrifice in the world and for confirmation you learn mission you are one who is not created to be selfish to be egotistical to live this life on your own you create it for a higher good and that good is to go out and to convert this world to christ the king to bring them to make soldiers for christ and for the church militant this is really important and boys will respond to that i can promise you because i've seen it with my own two eyes and the boys in our school it is unbelievable to me to see how especially the eighth grade boys how they respond to this kind of theological language to this kind of sacramental understanding of their masculinity and they really do seek to be catholic men and they will say that openly i'm trying to be a catholic man but it's only because we've given them and we've afforded them that vocabulary in that way of thinking well i think we've kind of touched on the many dimensions of this topic we've looked a little bit at the problem of why there's such a struggle for raising masculine boys today we've looked at some of our own experiences and some of the other paths how about maybe we we spent just a little more time on a couple other ones we've listed uh we had here natural wonder helping boys to develop wonder through the natural world now i gotta say this was not a huge part of my upbringing i was mostly an indoor air conditioned child it was not until i was like in my 20s and 30s that i even thought going on a hike was fun and then now you know we live on a little farm we in the woods and we're hiking you and i have gone out all sorts of places rivers forests you know all all sorts of outdoor places all with the goal of embracing and discovering wonder why is this an important dimension for authentic masculinity yeah this is one of the greatest gifts that my father gave me my dad is a child before nature he has this absolute fascination with the created world that is reminiscent of that of adam and eden i mean that's really why it's so important for masculinity when a man stands before creation he remembers that he's part of it and one of the reasons that technology is so dangerous is that it inherently separates you from the natural world that our boys are being raised now spending more time looking into a camera or screen than looking at the stars this is very dangerous this is not allowing our boys to recognize their own creaturelyness and also their own relationship with creation that's why it's so easy to pollute the way that we do that's why it's so easy to not ask any questions about where does our water come from or where does our trash go or why should i worry about cleaning up my room or why should i worry about brushing my teeth you know it actually flows down to all those different aspects of their lives because they're not in touch with the reality of the created world around them and that they're part of it and there's a responsibility to take care of themselves and also to take care of the world around them and also nature as my father used to always tell me is a beautiful teacher i always said that mother nature was my first catechist she was the first one to teach me about the glory of god when a boy looks up to the sky and a bald eagle flies over his head this this challenges a spirit to soar or when you have your son plant a seed and every day you take him outside to water it and through his own care and compassion for creation at the fruit of his hand he aids the creator and blossoming arose or allowing food and sustenance to come out by the work of his of his own two hands and his own body and his the sweat of his brow this sense of wonder is absolutely innate to the human person and if we don't allow our boys to develop it at a young age what's going to happen is that they're going to seek artificial stimulation at the cost of actual satisfaction and these are two very different things artificial stimulation is passing it does not have any long lasting effects but actual satisfaction to stand before the sunrise and to see that the world is bigger and that you're small in it this is one of the greatest gifts we could possibly receive so i strongly encourage all of our fathers as much as possible first of all and foremost to start falling in love with nature yourselves explore the world around you fall in love with creation we catholics are worldly people in the proper sense of that word not in the sense of sin but in the sense of grace we are people of the world for god so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son this earth is our home adam ha adam means means man means humanity the human person and what was the human person entrusted with in genesis to name creation and what you see here is this innate connection between adam and between the world around us so our boys deserve that sense of wonder and it will unlock for them a desire to see everything around them as gifts and as beauty it also dispels by the way the horrific vices of sarcasm pessimism and of negative mindedness well you can't just drop a bomb like that at the end of the at the end of your statement and say say more about that how can nature disabuse us of sarcasm and cynicism so this is going more into the realm of spiritual direction but the root of jadedness cynicism pessimism is always a lack of gratitude and a lack of being able to see grace and beauty in the world around us so when we are no longer able to recognize the glory of the clouds the splendor of the oak the symphony of the wind when we can't see how phenomenal it is that we just opened up our eyes this morning then the world becomes a very cold place and i see it as an enemy it's no longer something that i want to live in it's a rock that i can't stand but when you're exposed to the natural world it reminds you of how small these problems in your lives actually are it reminds you of the fact that there's a world and it's good and it's beautiful and it's worth fighting for and it's worth living in i love that dialogue between sam i was just gonna say you sound like samwise i believe there's something worth fighting for masterfrodo such a a masterful dialogue which by the way shows j.r.o tolkien's own love of nature obviously he was a man deeply in love with the world around him we know that he loved trees that he loved imagination i am also i'm also a great lover of trees i would go outside my little brother actually famously said until he was nine years old that he wanted to grow up to become a tree well it's a little possibility he's not fully he was very disappointed when he explained the biology of trees but i want to be an entertainer but uh but this world is worth fighting for there's good in it it's a beautiful place and we can't allow that pessimism to corrupt that truth and the only way that we're able to do that is by exposing ourselves to the to the wonders of nature excellent well let's wrap it up there um i i again i as i say this a lot on all of our episodes father blake and i would love to hear from you guys if you have follow-up questions especially from young dads i know a lot of young dads don't yet feel connected to a nearby priest or maybe they don't have other young dads they can discuss this with if you guys have questions leave them in the comment boxes father blake and i will try to get in there and and talk with you more about this topic any final words father blake boys and god yes so again i just want to encourage specifically our young fathers and maybe we could call this podcast father sons and god you know or how to raise how to raise boys to to follow god but to our young fathers first and foremost do not be discouraged i know that especially the men in our generation we have sort of one hand tied behind our back we were raised in a generation that didn't always have the best role models of masculinity we were raised in a generation that was highly dictated by pornographic and over-sexualized culture we were raised in a generation that did not really understand how to follow christ properly and how to live according to the precepts of the church and to tradition and that's not our fault but it is our task it's our task to rise up and to challenge these infrastructures and to seek to redeem them by our own catholic virtue and masculinity so do not be discouraged but be encouraged that the lord has chosen you at this point in history to be a man to re-establish the virtues of masculinity and catholicism within your son's generation of men and we thank god for that great grace and know that as a priest i'm with you you're not alone in this endeavor i too am seeking every day to grow in the virtues of my own catholic masculinity and i seek constantly through the sacraments of this of the holy sacrifice of the mass as well as the reconciliation to form boys young men and fathers after the sacred and living heart of jesus christ our lord well father blake's with you as a priest i'm with you as a fellow father and we're all with you in this community of listeners and in the communion of saints in the church so stay at it don't give up take hope um it is possible to raise good and holy boys in this world lots of men are doing it lots of men have done it um so let's do it together well thanks for listening to this latest episode of the burroughshire podcast and we'll see you guys in a couple of weeks god bless

Channel: The Burrowshire Podcast

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Length: 42min 0sec (2520 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020